There is no still point in all the Universe, and that is the rock upon which I stand

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

A doll's love

What frightens people these days? Guns? Despair?

An iPhone that won't work?

A tried and true gimmick of Hollywood horror films was often a slow, deliberate pan of a musty room, and then in a corner of the scene, just catching some dim, smoky light, a burnished gold sunbeam with dust motes reeling and spinning

--what is revealed is a silent, vacantly-staring doll--an antique perhaps, a decaying toy from a different era, a doll whose silence wasn't poetic, rather it was ghoulish, foreboding.

This is the past that tugged at the viewer, turned the fear inside out, and whether it's a personal moment of regret or a collective, subconscious dread of the past in general we sense that it is late in the hour--

maybe we shouldn't be in this room, because something we won't be able to control wants very much to go bump in the darkness.